How important was the arrest of Ramzi Yousef and ONeills role in effecting that arrest?
Both critical. And by virtue of my assistants being elsewhere around the globe, I ended up being the person in our office who was dealing with the apprehension and arrest and rendition of Yousef on my end. I was very concerned that it might not happen. John shared that, too. There were things, again, I can’t discuss that he made possible, keeping together that world coalition I talked about, so that [Yousef] was apprehended. All efforts were made to make certain that he was [apprehended], and then turned over to the U.S. government for trial. Had he not been, he would have been around the globe doing other things. The story is now well known. But when he fled from the Trade Center bombing in 1993, among the places he went really right before he was apprehended in Pakistan was to the Philippines, where he was mixing the bombs to blow up 12 jumbo jets in a 48-hour period. [He] was not far away from at least attempting to carry out that plot which would have resulted in thousands of death
